The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [32]
Corradino picked up the horse. `Thank you. I love it.'
He looked regretfully to the doorway, at the midday sunlight. `I should go.'
'As you wish, said Giacomo. `Perhaps you will visit again.'
I may not get a chance. I am going to France, any day now.
`Perhaps I could stay a bit longer? Just to watch you work?'
Giacomo smiled. `You can. But only if you keep out of the way.'
Corradino promised.
For the rest of the day Corradino watched as Giacomo worked what seemed to be miracles in glass. To take an unformed lump of matter and change it, like a conjuror or alchemist, into such works of art seemed to Corradino almost magical. He watched carefully each heating and reheating, each spin of the rod, each tender breath filling the belly of the red glass. He broke his promise many times as he crowded Giacomo, until the kindly man began to give him errands, and soon Corradino was as dirty as the other boys. Soon, too soon, the shadows began to lengthen in the doorway, and regretfully, Corradino supposed that he must go. But just as he was about to voice his thought a terrifying shape filled the doorframe.
It was a tall figure, black-cloaked and hooded, wearing a black mask. But the figure held none of the jollity of the Carnevale festivities. And when it spoke, its chilling tones seemed able to freeze the furnaces themselves.
`I seek a noble boy. Corrado Manin. Is he here?'
Giacomo alone stopped his work, as the nearest to the door. Glass-work was too precious, too easily ruined, to stop and stare. Even at this man, who was clearly someone of importance. And so it proved.
`I am an emissary of the Consiglio Maggiore. I have a writ to search for the boy.'
Giacomo subtly put his bulk between Corradino and the figure. He scratched his head and spoke, to belie his intelligence, in the wheedling tones of a peasant. `Gracious Signore, the only boys we have are the garzoni. The scimmia di vetro. There are no nobles here.' From the corner of his eye Giacomo could see the opal buttons of Corradino's coat winking in the furnace light, as if to betray their young master to the dark phantom. Giacomo turned away from the coat, hoping to draw the dark eyes of the mask with him.
Sure enough, the chilling orbs held his gaze. `If you see him, you have a duty to the State to inform the Council. Is that clear?'
`Si Signore.'
`Just the boy, you understand. We have the rest of the family.'
They have my family?
Giacomo heard the boy gasp and step from his shadow. Instantly he turned and cuffed Corradino to the ground, a stinging blow that burst his lip and gave him reason for his tears. `Franco, for the last time, go and draw some water! Che stronzo!' Giacomo turned back to the figure. `These boys, I tell you. I wish The Ten would send us some nobles to work here. More brains, less thickheaded.'
The eyes in the masked face looked from Giacomo to the boy on the floor. Filthy, shirtless, bleeding, snivelling. A mere glass monkey. With a flounce of the black cloak, the agent was gone.
Giacomo picked up the tear-sodden boy and cradled him in his arms while he wept. Not just now, but for years later, as his apprentice, living in his house, when Corradino woke at night screaming.
In my dream my mother smells of vanilla and blood.
Giacomo never told the other maestri where his new garzon was from. And he never told Corradino what his neighbour told him of the fisherman's house where the Manin family had been found. It was left as a warning - empty, no bodies, but its white walls slick with blood from floor to ceiling, like the scene of a butchery.
Of course, they found Corradino eventually. But it took five years, and by that time Giacomo, now foreman of the fornace, was able to plead for his apprentice's life in front of the Council, in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio of the Doge's Palace. He stood, tiny in the cavernous rooms, beneath the riotous frescoes of red and gold, and argued